The American Expeditionary Forces (Part III)

Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry

The estate of the late John Sayen has graciously given the Tactical Notebook permission to serialize his study of the organizational evolution of American infantry battalions. The author’s preface and the previous section of this book may be found via the following links:

As they approached the front lines, mud, shell-holes, and the dangers of enemy fire and observation often made it impossible for the service company wagons to get close enough to deliver their loads to the front-line troops, even after dark. Carrying parties had to move the supplies over the remaining distance but they required manpower that the supply companies lacked. Coupled with poor planning by inexperienced, overworked, and sometimes negligent supply officers, this often led to supply system breakdown. This in turn affected the infantry’s discipline and morale as well as its mobility and firepower.

Charles Grant, who was part of the British mission to Marshal Foch, traveled widely in the Meuse-Argonne combat zone. He saw field kitchens being looted by half-starved men and heard of 400 Americans starving to death as well as of many wounded dying because they could not get to the aid stations. To guard against supply failure, individual soldiers had to carry two day’s-worth of emergency rations, plus extra ammunition in addition to their 60-pound basic load. Having to march long distances with so much gear eroded the men’s physical fitness for battle.

Then too, it was only the rifle companies (and the pioneer platoons), which could furnish the manpower for the carrying parties needed to get rations and ammunition from the supply vehicles to the troops. They also had to furnish working parties for many other functions not otherwise provided for in the tables of organization. These included the fortifying of their own positions and the burial of their own dead, the latter activity not being exactly a morale booster.

The basic tactical concept behind the square AEF divisions under which the two regiments holding the division’s front line could be relieved by two more regiments to their rear was seriously undermined. The two regiments that were supposed to be resting were the ones that had to man all the work details. When it came time for them to relieve the front-line regiments it was, as historian Allan Millett described it, often a question “of replacing exhausted troops who had suffered casualties with exhausted troops who had not.”^[1]

It had certainly not been intended that the infantry serve as labor troops. Such tasks were supposed to have been carried out by separate regiments of pioneers modeled on those used by the French. In the French Army, pioneer regiments were lightly armed infantry serving under corps and army headquarters. They tended to consist of older men and were not the elite assault troops that filled the pioneer platoons in the infantry regiments. Though they could fight when necessary, their main function was to furnish the bulk of the semi-skilled and unskilled labor in the forward areas.

In imitation of this system the War Department raised 37 AEF pioneer regiments. These were organized as AEF infantry regiments without machinegun companies or sapper-bomber, pioneer, or one-pounder gun platoons. Only two of the 29 pioneer regiments to reach France did so before the last three months of the war. One regiment was supposed to go to each army corps and several to each army. However, the AEF pioneers proved to be so badly trained and led (even by AEF standards) that after front line service involving a mere 241 battle casualties most of the pioneers were pulled out of combat to serve as unarmed laborers far to the rear.^[2]

To provide for its medical and spiritual needs, each regiment received a more or less permanent attachment from the Medical and Chaplain Corps. However even a full-strength detachment barely sufficed to provide two medics (medical aid men) per rifle or machinegun company and to man skeletal aid stations at each battalion and the regimental headquarters. There was very little manpower for stretcher teams. Relative to their total size, the AEF received only about half to two thirds as many medical men as the earlier 1914 and 1917 regiments, despite the heavy casualties that AEF regiments were expected to incur.

The effectiveness of the AEF’s medical service reflected the meager resources devoted to it. More than 25% of AEF combat fatalities were men who died of their wounds. In subsequent wars this number rarely exceeded seven percent. However, many others who might have been saved died where they fell because a fatally inefficient casualty evacuation service could not find them in time. Even to qualify as “died of wounds” a man had to be living when he reached an aid station. The fact that a division had only one horse-drawn ambulance company that could operate away from the roads also constituted a serious shortcoming.^[3]

Two infantry regiments and a machinegun battalion (see Appendix 2.5) constituted an infantry brigade.^[4]

To assist him in commanding his brigade, a brigadier general had only a major (adjutant) Outside of its infantry and machineguns an AEF division included a field artillery brigade with two regiments (24 guns each) of 75mm field guns and one of 155mm howitzers plus a company of 6-inch trench mortars. There was also a regiment of engineers with six companies (six officers and 250 men each), a signal battalion, and the division trains (121 officers and 3,121 men) divided into ammunition, supply, engineer, and medical sections.^[5]

In its final form, and at a full strength of more than 28,000, one 1918 AEF infantry division had more men in it than the entire United States Army did when many of the officers who would command these divisions first received their commissions. It was nearly twice as large as any British, French, or German division. Ironically its size did not buy it the staying power that the AEF leadership had hoped for. This was due in part to the logistical difficulties already described and as well as the shortcomings of the Army’s personnel replacement system.

There was never enough manpower. When the United States declared war, the Regular Army amounted to only 127,600 officers and men. A Regular Army Reserve, authorized in 1912, had not quite reached 4,800 members. There was also an Officers’ Reserve Corps of about 2,000 and an Enlisted Reserve Corps (mainly technical specialists) of 10,000. The National Guard mustered 181,000 of which 80,000 had already been called into Federal service for the Mexican troubles. There was also a National Guard reserve (inactive Guard members still available for call-up in wartime) which had grown to about 10,000. Besides these, there were an unknown number of graduates from the various reserve officer-training programs.

By prodigious effort, the Army increased this total of perhaps 335,000 trained or semi-trained men to 3.7 million by the Armistice. Early planning had called for one third of all divisions to serve as replacement depots or field-training units charged with keeping the remaining combat divisions filled with men. The system broke down, however, as heavy losses forced the intended depot divisions to be used as combat units instead. Only six of the 42 AEF divisions to reach France before the Armistice (three more arrived soon afterwards) actually served as replacement or training depots instead of the 14 that were needed.

As an emergency measure, five combat divisions, and later two of the depot divisions, were skeletonized to immediately create urgently needed replacements but, of course, this rendered them useless for either combat or depot duty. Another division had to be fragmented to provide men for rear area support duties and yet another was broken up to flesh out three French divisions. Even in February 1918, (before the AEF had seen serious combat) the four combat divisions in the AEF I Corps were 8,500 men short (mostly in their infantry regiments). The 41^st Division, which was the corps’ depot division and charged with supplying those missing men was itself 4,500 men short. By early October 1918, AEF combat units needed 80,000 replacements but only 45,000 were expected before 1 November. At the end of October, the total shortfall had reached 119,690, including 95,303 infantrymen and 8,210 machine gunners. Only 66,490 replacement infantrymen and machine gunners would be available any time soon. For most of the war, AEF combat divisions were typically short by 4,000 men. After August 1918, even divisions fresh from the United States usually needed men. Too many divisions had been organized too quickly.^[6]

Of course, the root cause of the manpower problem was even more basic. Men were being used up faster than they could be replaced. The AEF suffered most of its battle casualties between 25 April and 11 November 1918, a period of less than seven months. These combat losses amounted to between 260,000 and 290,000 officers and men, of whom some 53,000 were killed in action or died of their wounds. The rest were wounded or gassed but 85% of these subsequently returned to duty. About 4,500 AEF prisoners of war were repatriated after the Armistice. Five thousand others became victims of “shell shock.” Accidental casualties, including those known to have been caused by “friendly fire” (total friendly fire losses must have been considerable, given the poor state of infantry-artillery coordination), or disease or self-inflicted wounds, far exceeded those sustained in battle.

Two thirds of the more than 125,000 Army and Marine Corps deaths between April 1917 and May 1919 occurred overseas and nearly half (57,000) were from disease. Pneumonia and influenza-pneumonia, which produced the infamous “swine flu” epidemic of 1918, were the chief killers but many victims who became ill before the Armistice did not actually die until after it. Between 14 September and 8 November 1918 some 370,000 cases were reported in the United States alone. Within less than two years between one quarter and one third of the men serving in the US Army had died or became temporarily or permanently disabled by battle, disease, accident, or misconduct. Had such losses continued, the United States might soon have begun to experience the same war weariness and manpower “burnout” that had been plaguing the British, French, and Germans.^[7]

With regard to the infantry, the woes of the AEF replacement and training system were much increased by the prevailing belief that because an infantryman needed few technical skills he had little to learn and could be quickly and easily trained from very average human material. Technical arms such as the engineers, signal corps, artillery, and, more significantly, the air corps got the pick of the AEF’s manpower.

The infantry soon became the repository for those deemed unfit for anything better. Many infantrymen saw themselves, and were seen, as cannon fodder. Morale and cohesion were further undermined by the practice of stripping new divisions of men (often before they had even left the United States) to fill older ones. The better men and officers avoided infantry duty to seek less demanding “technical” jobs. Of course, training suffered grievously.

As demands for replacements became more insistent, men who supposedly had received several months’ training were appearing in the front lines not knowing how to load their rifles. Others proved to be recent immigrants who could not speak English. Infantrymen of small physique who might have rendered useful service in non-infantry roles, soon collapsed under the physical burdens placed on them and became liabilities rather than assets. Losses among even good infantry were heavy enough but mediocre infantry melted away at an astonishing rate. Indiscipline, disorganization, and ignorance inevitably increased losses by what must have seemed like a couple of orders of magnitude. These losses were likely to be replaced, if at all, by men of even lower caliber.

Straggling was an especially pernicious problem, which the military police had only limited success in controlling. Even more than actual casualties, it caused some units to simply evaporate. During the Meuse-Argonne offensive, for example, one division reported that it was down to only 1,600 effective men. However, soon after it arrived at a rest area, it reported 8,400 men in its infantry regiments alone.^[8]

The officer situation was even worse. The pre-war officer corps was quickly swamped. Early 1918 estimates determined that 150,000 new officers were needed and that 200,000 officer candidates would have to be recruited in order to allow for those who would fail to qualify. When the United States declared war, there were but 5,800 Regular Army officers on active duty. To these could be added about 3,200 trained National Guard officers. Another 8,800 National Guardsmen with prior enlisted service or service in the Officers’ Reserve Corps or other training programs received commissions later on.

The United States Military Academy at West Point churned out five classes in 19 months, although this only raised the Regular officer total to about 6,000 by the Armistice. However, 16,000 deserving Regular Army non-commissioned officers became temporary lieutenants. Another 70,000 professional men such as doctors, lawyers, chaplains, and also businessmen who knew how to run supply, accounting, shipping or procurement offices were commissioned directly from civilian life. The rest, some 96,000, would have to come from the Officer Training Camps (OTCs) or from the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) set up in the colleges.

Prior to the war, most regular officers were commissioned either from West Point or from the ranks. In 1913, in order to raise interest in military preparedness and to build up a reserve of potential officers Major General Leonard Wood helped to start two volunteer training camps for college students. In 1915, similar camps were run for prominent business and professional men and politicians, the best known being held at Plattsburgh, New York. The graduates of these camps formed the Military Training Camp Association (MTCA), which continued to run training camps and would later give the wartime OTCs a considerable head start. However, the OTCs were plagued by shortages, particularly of qualified instructors and well thought out curricula.

Unlike the MTCA camps, they were not public relations gimmicks but actually had to produce competent officers, and very quickly. However, they soon degenerated into something akin to recruit training. This was in sharp contrast to the French and Germans who screened officer candidates far more carefully (the process required written examinations and prior enlisted service), gave them thorough training from experienced instructors, and evaluated them in combat. Although class prejudice played a role (especially in the German Army) far greater weight was placed on demonstrated leadership and decision making skills. The American choice to commission college men with little screening produced a system which, unlike the German, but similar to the British, was not merely influenced by social class but largely based on it. As was the case with the enlisted ranks, the best AEF officers tended to go into the technical services.^[9]

Once he had received his commission, taken over his new command, and prepared to lead it into battle, the life of an infantry lieutenant turned out to be far more of a challenge than anyone expected. Not only was combat physically dangerous and both physically and mentally exhausting, it was also complex, infinitely various, and required an ability to coordinate the actions of several combatant arms. Additionally, an officer had to be concerned with discipline, logistics, and the training and motivation of his own men. Of such matters most infantry officers knew very little. To expect a recent college graduate with three months of what was only a little more advanced than recruit training to master all of this was, in the great majority of cases, to expect the impossible. Even Regular officers soon found themselves overwhelmed. In the 1^st Division, for example, in 1917 there was a great shortage of lieutenants because most of the pre-war lieutenants had to be made captains. When more lieutenants arrived, most were brand new. Many divisions had few pre-war officers below major. Even as captains, pre-war officers found themselves commanding rifle companies that were bigger than the battalions that they had recently led platoons in. AEF rifle platoons could easily be as large and complex as pre-war companies. Few officers had ever worked with machineguns. Regular officers had seldom seen even the guns attached to their own regiments.[10]

To address these problems, the Army set up schools in France to give crash courses in the basics. However, AEF headquarters frequently indulged a habit of pulling key officers out of their units just prior to some major operation so that a training course they were to attend could start on time. This was both corrosive to cohesion and typical of the simplistic and self-defeating approaches that the 1918 Army so frequently employed to address its problems.^[11]

The results of these weaknesses were not encouraging. One of Britain’s most competent First World War officers, General Ivor Maxse, toured the AEF II Corps. He described its unfortunate “90-day wonder” OTC officers as men who rarely took their platoons out to practice handling them and whose professional skills were held in low esteem even by their own men. Unable to hold their units together or maintain discipline, these AEF officers frequently led their troops to their deaths in ill-conceived frontal assaults. Their personal courage, however, was seldom in question. Officer casualties among those who served in front line infantry battalions amounted to some 50.7% as compared to 44.7% for their men. Even some of the AEF officers’ harshest critics called them “gallant and brave.” Nevertheless, the price that these officers (and their men) paid for their ignorance was a high one.^[12]

Even worse, a “professionally challenged” OTC lieutenant could expect little help from his non-commissioned officers. The best of these were becoming officers themselves and the Army tended to undervalue the others. They were neither set apart from the private men nor given the special privileges and responsibilities to which NCO rank should have entitled them (and which German, French, and British NCO’s received). In the AEF, non-commissioned rank was a casual affair, easily won and just as easily lost. NCO training was mostly “on the job.”  Indeed, anyone who survived heavy combat almost had to be made a non-commissioned officer since such battlefield “school of hard knocks” survivors could usually outperform any NCO sent directly from the United States.^[13]

Despite its many sacrifices and despite its fairly impressive achievement of, within one year, getting itself to Europe in a state in which it could fight at all, the overall performance of the AEF was ultimately a disappointment. The British and French accused it of having contributed more to the successful escape of the German Army (after its failed 1918 offensives) than to its ultimate surrender. General Pershing had insisted on having his own sector, ignored expert advice on tactics and logistics, clogged the roads with his oversized divisions, and held up the Allied advance by stalling out in the Meuse-Argonne.

In reaching these conclusions, the British and French were not entirely unprejudiced. Already annoyed at the Americans’ refusal to serve under their command, they disliked Pershing’s abrasive personality, his belittling of their own achievements, and his insistence on going his own way. Also, the French and British did not want to see the “upstart” Americans gain credit at the expense of their own men. However, more disinterested witnesses such as Charles Bean, the official Australian historian who had personally observed the Americans in action and was no partisan of the British, generally corroborated Anglo-French assessments of the AEF. German observers (also not without bias) tended to be critical as well.^[14]

Although the AEF’s combat effectiveness had improved significantly by the time of the Armistice, its performance still tended to vindicate those who had predicted that the Americans would need at least two years to field an efficient army. Even so, the AEF had two million relatively fresh men in action by October 1918 and this in a fight in which all the other participants had already largely exhausted themselves. The failure of the German 1918 offensives (to which the AEF made a small but significant contribution) was the beginning of the end and the AEF was subsequently able to win for President Wilson a measure of control over the postwar peace negotiations that committed both the Allies and the Central Powers to a settlement based on American war aims.^[15]

Editor’s Note: The format of the many appendices to this work fit poorly with Substack. For that reason, I have placed them on a PDF file that can be found at Military Learning Library, a website that I maintain.

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^[1] Ibid and Allen R. Millett, The General, pp. 337-338; Denis Winter, Haig’s Command (London, Viking Press 1991) pp. 216-221.

^[2] See ”Report of the Secretary of War” for FY 1925-26 (Washington DC. US GPO 1926) p 210; and Order of Battle of the United States Land Forces in the World War op cit pp. 1401-02.; The United States Army in the World War Vol 1, Organization op cit pp. 220-223. For a complete account see Moses Thisted, Pershing’s Pioneer Infantry of World War I (Hemet CA, Alphabet Printers 1982).

^[3] The United States Army in the World War Vol 1, Organizationon op cit pp. 344 and 378; Denis Winter pp. 219-220; and ”Report of the Secretary of War” for fiscal year 1925-26 op cit pp. 192-240.

^[4] An AEF infantry brigade was purely a tactical headquarters and provided no combat support or combat service support for its subordinate units. The headquarters was very lean and consisted only of a brigadier general, a major (serving as adjutant, there was no executive officer) and three liaison officers (lieutenants) of whom two were also the general’s aides. Only the division headquarters had a full staff.

^[5] US War Department, The United States Army in the World War Vol 1, Organization pp. 341-384.

^[6] Weigley pp. 348-349 and 356-357; Lerwill op cit pp. 199-216; Millett & Murray pp. 147-148.

^[7] ”Report of the Secretary of War” for fiscal year 1925-26 op cit pp. 192-240; this contained the latest revisions of AEF battle casualty figures. See also Leonard P. Ayres, The War with Germany, A Statistical Summary (Washington DC US Government Printing Office 1919) pp. 113-130; and Lerwill op cit pp. 213-216. John Mosier in his recent and excellent book, The Myth of the Great War (New York, Harper-Collins, 2001) disputes many of these figures. He notes (pp. 12 and 341) that an actual count of AEF war graves shows that some 85,252 American soldiers and Marines died in France, though not all of these would necessarily have been battle deaths. However, he also cites (p. 365 fn 4) correspondance in the Congressional archives that reveals the dissatisfaction of key officers with the casualty statistics published by Colonel Ayres, the War Department’s chief statistician. It also reveals a War Department insistance on manipulating casualty figures, presumably in order to protect the reputations of influential senior officers.

^[8] Millett & Murray op cit pp. 148-150; and “Extracts from the Report of the Infantry Board, AEF on Organization and Tactics” copy of unpublished manuscript produced by the AEF in France and dated April 8, 1919 pp. 4-6. See also Lerwill pp. 208-210.

^[9] Ayres op cit pp. 21-22; Millett & Murray pp. 146-147; Lerwill pp. 194-198; see also “Extracts from the Report of the Infantry Board, AEF on Organization and Tactics” pp. 6-8; and Edwin N. McClellan The United States Marine Corps in the World War (Washington DC Us Government Printing Office 1920, reprinted 1968); for an account of the MTCA movement see John Garry Clifford, op cit.

[10] Combined arms training with infantry, engineers, and field artillery would have been rare. In 1916,  the Regular US Army had but 36 batteries of mountain, field and heavy artillery and 12 companies of engineers to support its 30 infantry and 15 cavalry regiments. Most troop training was conducted within the regiments at the company and battalion/squadron levels.

^[11] “Extracts from the Report of the Infantry Board, AEF on Organization and Tactics” pp. 6-8; Lerwill op cit pp. 194-196; Armstrong op cit pp. 143-144; and Millett and Murray op cit p 149.

^[12] Denis Winter op cit pp. 217-218; and Millett & Murray pp. 146-147.

^[13] Millett & Murray p. 147.

^[14] Denis Winter op cit pp. 216-221. For German views see also Record Group 165 Box 623 Ellsdran File No. 2016-1068, US War Dept G-2 “German General Staff Views of the United States Army in the World War” (Military Attache Berlin Report No. 9549 June 26, 1928).

^[15] David Trask op cit pp. 174-175. John Mosier in his book op cit insists that the AEF made a critical contribution without which an Allied victory would probably have been impossible in 1918 and makes some persuasive though not entirely conclusive arguments in that direction. Mosier is right to point out that not only did the United States contribute two million soldiers late in the war but all along had furnished the Allies with money and raw materials, without which they could probably not have stayed in the fight.